nXt Farmer Status: Not responding

[Andrew Uno]

I'm trying to identify a problem that has arisen as of late for me. The machines utilizing nXt Render Farm are not rendering though their individual statuses say active and they have projects assigned to them. At first I didn't think anything was going on but 2 days later low and be hold the tasks they were assigned were not done. I sat there and watched for a bit and noticed that in farm manager the machines would task would blink out for a moment then return. I then pulled up Windows Task Manager and found that nXt Farmer is showing status Not Responding.  When the machine loses it's task the application indicating nXt Farmer is running leaves the Windows Task manager list.

 Any idea what is happening? Everything is pathed to our server correctly and this is a new problem for me.

[Roy Hirshkowitz]

Sorry Andrew-- just getting back to things.  The nodes are almost certainly crashing.  The current Render Farm, as we discussed, is not very sophisticated.  If a node crashes it gets fired up again and attempts to latch the next task.  This cycle can repeat forever.  Debugging this particular example is possible, although I haven't done any work on this in a long time (we don't have a ton of render farm users) so it would require a pretty big effort on both of our parts.

[Andrew Uno]

Thanks for getting back to me Roy, what would you suggest I do to address this problem? Would something as simple as reinstalling nXt Farmer be a simple solution or should I just be aware that this can happen?

[Roy Hirshkowitz]

If it's working for some models and not others there is likely something in the model that's triggering the bug.  Debugging, in this case, would require simplifying the model until it doesn't happen any more, then adding back some of the complexity a little at a time to see if you can trigger the problem and figure out what it is.  Sometimes, running an AutoCAD audit on the thing will help.

[Andrew Uno]

ok will check and see what could be causing the instance